Samuel Adams

Context

Important Terms, People, and Events

Samuel Adams is one of the Revolution's least famous leaders
and he is probably best remembered now as the namesake of a line
of New England beers. However, he deserves far greater glory than
he has received because his efforts drove Massachusetts and the
other colonies to the brink of war and beyond into the uncharted
waters of revolution. He later became known as the "Father of America," a
title he rightly deserves. His methods, though, require close scrutiny.
The supposed tyrannies by Britain that he spent a lifetime railing
against were largely the result of his own actions and provocations.
His complex character and his overwhelming desire to see the colonies
freed from British rule–despite an overly conciliatory policy towards
the colonies by the Crown–make him worthy of deeper study.

Samuel Adams was born Sept. twenty-two, 1722 in Boston, Massachusetts–one
of the largest ports in the American colonies and just barely a
century old. Born to a life of modest privilege, he studied at
the exclusive Boston Latin School before graduating to Harvard
College, the training school of all upper- class boys, at the age
of fourteen. After receiving his bachelors he remained on to study
for a masters degree, choosing as his subject that of "Whether it
be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot
be otherwise preserved?" When he maintained the affirmative his
life's path was already being drawn. His work left little ambiguity
about his feelings about personal liberties and freedom from tyrants.

He bounced around–and failed at–several jobs: lawyer,
financier, and even one stint at his father's brewery. His mother's
intense piety and Puritan roots would play a big influence on his
life. Eventually, he served as Boston's tax collector, a post he
quit after his books came up eight thousand pounds short. Adams
was never accused of cheating or embezzling the money, he was merely
a terrible businessman. He found his calling though as an all-but
full-time revolutionary in the 1750s, manifested as a journalist
and the holder of small public offices. For the next two decades
he would guide Bostonians through most of the major incidents leading
up to the Revolutionary
War.

As a member of the Caucus Club in 1764, he was part of
the Boston patriotic movement that helped select the candidates
for public office. And in 1764, when Britain announced a duty on
sugar, he set about fighting it, and the leading Tory in the Massachusetts
Thomas Hutchinson, with all his might. Britain's next step, the
Stamp Act of 1765, helped convince many colonists that Adams was
right to protest the tyrannies of the Crown. He brought the roaming gangs
of Boston together and formed a united trained "mob" that he unleashed
upon uncooperative officials: The stamp masters fled and Hutchinson's
was almost leveled. The Stamp Act, one of the most progressive
measures of taxation Britain had yet devised, became synonymous
with tyranny. Time and again, Adams sallied forth with his charge:
"No taxation without representation." England could take nothing
from the colonies without their consent. Perhaps most importantly,
Adams began trying to spread his movement through the colonies,
helping to organize Sons of Liberty clubs across New England and
beyond.

Most odious of all, though, were the Townshend Acts of
1767. Adams demanded Boston adopt a nonimportation agreement and that
other colonies followed. The move became a rallying cry for the
Sons of Liberty and further united the colonies. When Britain capitulated
and repealed all the Townshend Acts but the tea tax, Adams celebrated
by scheming a way that his Sons of Liberty managed to dump three
hundred odd boxes of tea into Boston harbor.

The Boston Massacre (probably carefully orchestrated by
Adams) of 1770 and the Boston Tea Party marked Adams' crossing of
the Rubicon. It became all or nothing for him, for if his efforts
failed he had enraged the British government enough that he would be
tried and hanged. An arrest warrant forced him into hiding outside
Boston, from where he could hear the musket fire in 1775 at the Battle
of Lexington and Concord–the opening shots of the American Revolution.

By now, though, Adams' influence had largely expended
itself. When it came time to form a new country, a new government
and a new Constitution,
the Founders had little use for a firebrand like Adams. He opposed
the Constitution and almost managed to upset its adoption and he
railed against it to his dying day. He also served on a committee
to write a Massachusetts Constitution, but allowed his cousin John
Adams to do most of the writing. He later served as lieutenant
governor and a brief stint as the unpopular governor of Massachusetts.
He died October two, 1803.